Enterprise Project Management Solution
4.2/5 (162 reviews)Pros
The ability to customize Clarizen is one of it's strongest features. While not as advanced as some of the bigger SaaS players like Salesforce, it still provides a robust set of features to allow you to create custom business processes to accomplish your companies goals. They compete pretty well against other companies with much larger teams.
Another great feature we use a lot is the expansive and complex WBSs you can have for projects. This allowed us to have a better sense of project flow and visibility to where our projects are at.
Cons
Our biggest struggle comes with the idea that a PSA should be a three legged stool (projects/task management, time tracking/resource management, and project financial management). We can only seem to make two work at a time with Clarizen. Our PMs want some pretty detailed project plans to really understand where tasks are and who is responsible, but when you implement that with time tracking it becomes a nightmare for resources to know where to submit there time entries.
As our organization grew, the financials and resource management became more important that detailed project plans so we struggled to find a balance of how detailed our WBSs should be because everything within the project plan was tied to time entries and drove project cost. It has become pretty administrative for some of our PMs.
My organization selected Clarizen from a wide array of project management software options just over 2 years ago and we're very happy with our decision.
We're a training organization, so slack built into most projects is used up before we get the handoff. This means we must be very efficient and well-coordinated. Clarizen gives us what we need all in a single application. Social, email, file attachment/link to work items... prevent us from checking multiple sources for information.
We've customized Work Plans and documentation templates our project managers use to quickly execute tasks. The social functions have replace our Outlook email and we've found that makes projects much more transparent and eliminates hidden agendas that often hit projects.
Clarizen support is phenomenal! We have a dedicated expert that currently meets with us every other week and I get quick resolution to any issue posted to their Support Request Center. The dedicated expert has been especially helpful as we're constantly customizing the system to the point that it will soon become the training department's operating system with schedules, timesheets, project plans... everything right in Clarizen.
Pros
All in one; Social, Work Plans, Scheduling...
Cons
The User Guide is useless.
Pros
One single platform where both project information and customer information meet, thanks to the Salesforce.com integration. This enables salespeople to keep a real-time view on margins and project progress, without them needing to ask a project manager for a status update or a meeting. The information is right there, up to date and accurate.
Cons
You need to make a solid business case and build a real plan to get the budget approved. Most companies have a lot of tools and some work together with others and... but none beat Clarizen if you ask me - it is a "one-stop" to get all information. So do the math to show you can save money by centralizing the tools, and that you can lower the time spent on managing different solutions. It helps if you show dashboards: management likes dashboards (and numbers).
Clarizen was not so easy to explain to the whole team, it is a very complete solution. So we decided to "drip-feed" it to the teams.
Clarizen is a great platform for project management, workflow management and internal communication tracking. The reporting suite is also very good and there seems to be a keen drive to continually improve the product.
Customer support throughout setup and launch was excellent with a product specialist available onsite, phone and web-conference to help train our team and customize our environment. Despite some challenging requests our support team and the flexibility of the system allowed to achieve near all our requirements thus far.
Pros
Flexibility/Customisation - the system is extremely adaptable and can be used for a number of functions beyond that which it was designed because of it.
Reporting - The reporting suite is excellent but there is still room for improvement in terms of pivots and lining relevant data in reports.
Cons
Support - Although our setup support was great there can be a delay in resolving system bugs but no more than most software services.
Caps on custom fields - There are caps on customisation depending on the package you choose and the price hike between them can be quite significant.
As our organization grew we knew need to migrate from our existing PM tool. We initiated an exhaustive search to find the best solution for our business. There are hundreds of "PM" tools out there of various shapes and sizes. We quickly narrowed this down to a handful of potential partners. We found Clarizen to be the best fit for our business. Clarizen accomplished 80% of our requirements out of the box. Because of the solutions extreme flexibility we were able to develop custom workflows to meet the rest of our requirements. Clarizen is scaleable to meet our growing business needs.
Pros
Extremely flexible in all aspects of the solution. The end user can customize the views to best fit his specific work requirements. Sys Admins can configure the system to provide custom functionality. Software updates occur regularly and they provide meaningful enhancements and bug fixes. Support has been great.
Cons
Honestly, not come to mind.
Not only entering timesheets, but also do proper estimations for the project budgeting and resource planning!
Pros
The ability to automatically track the tasks start/end dates if there are dependencies set up as well as when there are vacations or holidays for a person. The automatic smart systems make huge help for any human mistake on those calcualtions and future possible changes. Thanks for this!
Cons
When someone creates a vacation request in Clarizen, it would be good to have a notification mechanism to inform the project manager about it, if the person is assigned to a task of this PM's project(s). Otherwise, only the direct manager of the person is being announced. And if there is no established manual process, the vacation request gets approved without the PM being informed about it. This is really serious problem.
Working with Clarizen for a few years. Started before the rich reporting capability existed. Using it for Portfolio and Project Management in an Advanced Engineering Product Development team.
Pros
It is Microsoft Project Management on steroids. It gives you the same capability to manage a project but adds features to provide a complete solution. Easy customization to fit each department needs. Resource Management across of projects, Collaboration at all levels, robust reporting module...
Cons
The reporting module provides the capability to easily create dashboards. I have created dashboards for every level and function of the organization. However, it is difficult for a manager to see his staff's dashboard.
Clarizen is the foundation of our project management process. It provides a wide range of features and customization to support the needs of our design team, project managers, production, upper management and sales staff. With customized reports, each team member can see the data that is important to them. With customized views estimating can see what is important to them, sales can see that they need and project management can see their information. The dashboards are great to show a snapshot of how many projects are doing. It is obvious the people at Clarizen have put a lot of time and effort developing and refining the project management process. It's a great program to get everyone on your team involved
Pros
The almost unlimited features and options
Cons
There are almost too many choices, it takes a while to really gain a full understanding of how everything works
Great visibility into my projects.
Pros
The tool offers A LOT of functionality. As I'm not a system administrator, I am not aware of everything that Clarizen can do, but whenever our admins unleash a new feature, I'm always excited by it. The new Android app is super nice/handy to have, especially for logging time. The support is great: we have logged bugs before, and these are generally resolved very fast. I am not blocked for long whenever something like that happens.
Cons
The fact that there are so many features also has a downside. I feel like there is a lot more to discover, and sometimes, things are no consistent. For example, in some views, I can hide the right-hand vertical "space" (or menu) and in others, I can't. I also find that column resizing is quite burdensome, and I have to resize columns in multiple views (it doesn't propagate.)
Clarizen has moved us from spreadsheet based project management to collaborative, efficient portfolio management. Adopting Clarizen was straight-forward and it was quick to see the benefits. Managing many projects simultaneously across many customers and project types is now possible and manageable.
Our development team have a much easier time of knowing what they should be working on in disparate cross-company project teams. The accompanying iPhone and Android apps help ensuring time-sheets are kept updated and communications are not missed.
It is hugely customisable in regards to setting up simple forms, workflows with notifications and visual aids. We've been able to recreate our own methodologies in Clarizen.
The only issue we have had is reaching the limit of custom fields possible without moving to the unlimited license model.
Support has been excellent and dependable.
We got very little benefit from this software, as it did not perform as expected.
Pros
Project management tool is comparable to MS Project. Users that are looking for a subscription PM product rather than purchasing MS Project may benefit from this software, but I am not sure if all PM features are available out-of-the-box at cheaper subscription levels.
Cons
Although the PM tool is comparable to MS Project, it also comes with a level of complication also comparable to MS Project. Full functionality of PM (i.e. including resource management) requires buy-in by all departments/users in the company, and this is difficult to acheive in large or diverse organizations.
Our company implemeted this software with the goal of bringing project management together with time reporting, expense reporting, and invoice processing. The purpose of implementing Clarizen was to have a centralized system where we could report project status by including all relevant metrics on the project in a list or detailed view, e.g. planned time vs. actual time, planned cost vs. actual cost, and project manager comments/narrative on goal vs. result. This purpose was never realized. Clarizen underestimated the work effort to develop customizations, which resulted in the time module never being completed, the expense/invoice modules were cumbersome to use, the related approval workflows had many problems, and support from Clarizen management was almost non-existent.
We are now taking a different approach. No longer do we believe that one system can handle all our needs, and so we have adopted different systems with some integration between them to try to bring together all project-related data.
We used Clarizen for our project management. It is easy to learn, user friendly and our employees love it.
Pros
The user friendliness of Clarizen can not be beat. Recently, our company moved to Clarizen for project tracking and the transition couldn't have been easier. Employees rave about the ease of the system.
Cons
If i had to choose, the disconnect between Projects and tasks on the same view.
It would be nice to have these without the need of workflows to integrate them.
After launching Clarizen in our organization, it was easier than ever before to do resource management and get timesheets in. Therefore the data is more accurate so we can now make sound business decision based on accurate information.
Pros
It's easy to use and to change configuration or customize to best meet your user's needs.
Cons
Cost management is great but could use the concept of effective date to make it easy to use when spanning the fiscal year or promoting individuals.
I started using Clarizen 18 months ago to manage multiple complex projects and to corral a pool of shared resources. Out of the gate, Clarion performed well. But what I am most impressed with is the perpetual evolution towards great. Updates are delivered on a regular basis and deliver meaningful improvements.
Pros
At its core, Clarion is a strong project portfolio management tool. The social media element is seamlessly incorporated and has added a valuable dimension to project management. The resource management component is strong and just got stronger with the Summer '15 update. And, most important, Clarizen provides a high-availability SaaS platform. They haven't left me hanging.
Cons
I am still waiting for a mechanism to assign multiple managers to a task. Our projects span multiple shifts. I need a mechanism to allow all shift supervisors to adjust tasks and sub-tasks as needed.
The pricing model could be improved. The number of customizations are limited in all except the Enterprise package. We use all three customizations in our package and, at times, turn some off so we can turn others on. Surely a better balance can be reached.
Pros
Working with Clarizen is always easy, they are incredibly helpful and their Professional Services support is outstanding. Developing a custom timesheet module for our specific needs was never a problem for them and they have delivered far in excess of the original brief.
The layout and format of the system is so intuitive we have not needed to undertake lengthy training sessions to our users, almost all have found themselves navigating and operating without issue with only a basic introductory training session.
Cons
The only area where development is still required is the reporting tools. These tools are good, but they are not at the high level that I would want. That said there is significant development taking place that I am aware of and updates are made to improve this area particularly on a regular basis.
The tool does have the ability to export almost all data to Excel so if you can't do something within the reporting tools available, you probably can externally.
Pros
It is a phenomenal software because it offers great features to carry out a great management of business projects from the handling of mail, schedules and much more, offers excellent support as they answer any questions or problems personally ie go to the company to solve the inconvenience in the best time possible so not be satisfied with this great tool would be inappropriate because unlike other software works very well and provide a perfect orientation thus allowing to understand the operation of the software quickly that is why it is truly useful because through it we have everything in one place.
Cons
It may present some flaws but due to its very effective support it is something for which the use of this great software should not be limited.
Clarizen is so easy to use, the vast majority of users were up and running within minutes . The powerful social module incorporates item level in context discussions within each project, even to a task level. Flexibility is a strong feature, and the ability to track financial data across the entire project makes the tool a powerful asset in any business
Pros
Interface is intuitive. Plenty of awesome functionality
Cons
More Drag and Drop features would be nice , and possibly Agile standard out the box included
We are implementing Clarizen as a project management tool for the entire organization but starting in the Information Technology and Performance Improvement departments. Our goal is to capture all project requests and projects in one place for review, approval, management, and reporting. Clarizen has mostly met our expectations so far. Most of the items that have not met our expectations are minor. We are still early in our implementation so there are still lessons to learn in our journey.
Pros
1. Unlimited email-only users. Resources that infrequently or rarely work on projects can report progress via email without consuming an expensive license.
2. Email and/or API integration with work order systems. Clarizen doesn't charge an expensive license to integrate it with other systems.
3. A modern-looking user interface with an emphasis on social media-like collaboration.
4. Lots of options for charts and graphs for reporting.
5. Can import spreadsheets and MS Project workplans.
6. Lots of training and support webinars every week.
7. Pre-recorded online training via the Clarizen University.
Cons
1. Support seems slow to respond to support requests.
2. There is currently a bug they haven't fixed yet that requires you to keep resetting column widths in reports and dashboards. They don't stick.
3. Their online self-help knowledge base seems new and thin.
4. They don't have a feature I used in other project management software to identify the last (most recent) note, comment, etc. on an item. This can be worked around via user training or some custom workflow programming but it would be nice if they built it in as others have.
We needed to evaluate how we could best deliver a quick first time to value for our customers on our implementation team.
Pros
Clarizen enabled our team to effectively manage the numerous projects we had while surfacing the insights we needed to make business decisions.
Cons
Like any software that is aimed at solving complex business problems, Clarizen had so many features that it became overwhelming to our team during implementation. When a business has to undergo major changes to their operations, it needs the transition to be as easy as possible. This is more of a critique for most large software solutions as opposed to just Clarizen.
Working on clarizen was a new world for me as I had never used an online project management tool. As most project managers it is hard to move out of the comfort zone which really works, but Clarizen was different. It provided the flexibility of updating projects on the go as well as task assignment to resources and updates to stake holders. Clarizen also helped us to decrease the time to update project status as it was easy to get reminders on updates and also daily status reports on emails for escalation. The social collaboration part is one of the best I have experienced so far on any type of platform for the "working" environment.
Pros
Social Collaboration
Customization right down to the fields being used in each and every element.
Cons
I would see that at times the interface due to it's beauty becomes a bit slow.
Pros
There are two things I Love about Clarizen. First, their staff, friendly, helpful and fulfilling the companies position of customer success. This couldn't be more important in making Clarizen a valuable tool for my company. Two, configuration! tired of wrapping your companies processes around a a software's functions? We were too, and with Clarizen's customization functions we were able to wrap it around our processes. This made for seamless integration into our ecosystem and simplistic integration into employees daily life.
Cons
There isn't much to say here. Clarizen is a great tool and if leveraged properly will become the best tool in your arsenal.
Great product that allows for a ton of flexibility. It's been great to be able to customize for the specific needs of each team, yet still have all teams in the same product.
Pros
The level to which you can customize, create custom actions and workflows, etc. is the best part of the product
Cons
Implementation can be tricky. Your instance starts with everything turned on, it would be better to start with a minimal instance and turn things on as you need to implement.
My team has used Clarizen for a little over a year now. I cannot say enough good things on how well it has done for my team and organizing the implementations of our Software. My team from an employee level up to management are able to use Clarizen to run their individual days and teams.
We implement time and attendance software for clients and use Clarizen to organize our Projects with our specific timelines that we have. Clarizen makes it easy for employees to know exactly where they are at with all of their clients and allows management to easily track the progress of their teams.
Pros
Customization. I cannot say enough on how exceptional the Clarizen technical team is with taking our needs and making them happen in the system. One specific example is I formulated a scoring system for incoming clients that based upon how they were going to use our system would be given a "complexity" score so that I could assign higher level clients to my best employees and lower level clients to my lesser experienced employees. Clarizen took my request that I submitted and within a month had the entire scoring system automated and up and running giving me a fantastic tool to use daily.
Cons
Pricing. Clarizen needs to be able to add options on as fixed costs instead of raising the overall monthly rate. My team doesn't use every aspect of the program so when I need more of just one option in the system I shouldn't have to pay for a higher level across the board with more of all their options when I need just one. I am hoping that can change in the future to meet individual client needs.
Clarizen is a great solution, which is proving to be an invaluable tool within our business. Despite having some very strictly defined processes that Clarizen were required to include, all of these were developed efficiently in full collaboration, even ensuring that developments were future proofed to ensure continued use with no requirement to pay out for additional development.
The layout and ‘look and feel’ is crisp and clean while virtually everything on the page can be configured to ensure that it best fits the user’s requirements. Before implementing Clarizen it was difficult to get true visibility of how the portfolio of projects sat, where potential conflict of resourcing would occur. With the powerful calendar and resource tools that come as standard in Clarizen it has become easy to see these potential issues earlier, allowing for a more planned response which ultimately benefits our customers and strengthens our brand.
Pros
Flexible and easy to use. Social interaction, with in-context discussion panels for all projects and tasks. Easy monitoring of time submissions. Great (and expanding) set of modules (Apps) that can be deployed to further enhance the solution.
Cons
Reporting tools are still lacking, but this is actively being addressed with regular updates and improvements released.
All in all, it is the best time-tracking solution that is quite scalable and flexible. If you're ready to work manually for the time being, it has flexible, scalable and can be implemented very quickly. If you are prepared to work with a few manual steps, for the time being (that hopefully will improve), it is a great value product.
Pros
It has a great interactive interphase and amazing functionality. Its easy to enter and track the time via this software. The planning tools allow me to plan and define my project, its functionality, its feasibility, and the resource available.
Cons
Bit expensive, the level of functionality for lower-amount licences is seemingly poor compared to advanced versions. Reports corresponding to calendar days require manual entry.
Visibility into projects across the entire professional services portfolio. This gave us a better understanding of our teams and how they were utilized.